


Worse Things in Life Than Death

by Starships



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: AU, F/M, Oneshot, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-26 03:35:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2636543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starships/pseuds/Starships
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death loves the smell of grass, and crumpets, and Rose Tyler. </p><p>Rose Tyler loves getting him drunk with tequila. And him, she supposes.</p><p>An AU love story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worse Things in Life Than Death

The funeral catches her off guard, a gleaming Monday morning. She’s skipped school and walked to the cemetery, to see him. She’s surprised to see the throng of twenty in black lace and pressed cotton trousers so early in the day. She’s not surprised to see him, though. He’s watching, like always. 

 

Death is someone she’s grown up with. He’s followed her for years, gingerly placing Converse clad feet behind her, but only where she’s already stepped. He’s tall and shadowless, and when he smiles its like the doors of the world are closing, great opportunity that gets choked down in his maw.

 

He’s rather fond of crumpets.

 

She walks up to him and stares at his red trainers, stark against the grass. The light of the sun is so bright, and she asks him if it shines like this in heaven. 

 

He holds her tiny, twelve year old hand, and tells her he doesn’t know.

 

“That’s okay,” she replies soothingly. “I’ll go with you one day, and we’ll find out.”

 

He says he’d like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She’s fifteen and she’s got this tosser of a boyfriend now.

 

He likes that much, much less.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He doesn’t get to come inside when Jackie’s awake. Plants wilt around him, air gets sucked out of the room; Rose is the only creature he’s ever known who’s vibrancy still shines even when he clutches her hand to him. 

 

He doesn’t know how he’d explain the dead African Violet, so Rose politely yet firmly bans him from her home.

 

The same night, though, she’s left her window unlatched and discreetly moved her one plant from her desk to the kitchen windowsill. 

 

It was only hiding her biology homework from view, anyway.

 

He sneaks in every night and side by side they lay together, over the duvet and in their clothes, talking in hushed and dulcet tones. 

 

“You know, I actually had a piano fall on a woman once,” he says. “Horrific. But fast.”

 

“How did she sound?”

 

“Flat.”

 

Rose curls her face into her pillow to muffle her snort of laugher.

 

“What about axe murders?” she asks, caramel eyes wide. He stares pointedly into them, instead of looking to her mouth, which is an alarmingly delicious candy color.

 

He waves a hand dismissively. “Oh sure, a few of those here and there. Not as dramatic as the movies, though. Only takes one chop to kill a man, not dozens.”

 

“What’s the worst you’ve seen?” she whispers, inches from his chest. He feels her breath bounce across the exposed skin of his neck above his tie, feels the words hit him even harder. He only flashes back to the fire for a second before he shuts it violently out of his mind.

 

Running a hand through her golden hair, he kisses her forehead. 

 

“Oh, Rose,” he says. “I can’t.”

 

“It’s okay,” she murmurs, and then she rests her hand on his hip and cuddles closer, and not for the first time, he counts very slowly to five hundred until she’s asleep and his blood has stopped roaring. 

 

He leaves quietly through the window, but wraps his half of the blanket over her first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You know, little lady,” he says, ignoring her eye roll, “you really should clean in here.”

 

She quirks her eyebrow at the explosion of her room, and looks back at him.

 

“It looks like a pink elephant vomited,” he says pointedly, blowing on his mug of tea. Steam forms whorls around his face, vapors dancing over his dark eyes.

 

They’re cross-legged and playing Crazy Eights on the only oasis of carpet in her bedroom. Jackie’s sleeping, powerful snores heard through the flat’s thin walls. 

 

She’s winning, five to three. He owes her chips if she beats him double. 

 

Death doesn’t like to lose. What he does like, however, is Rose Marion Tyler’s smile, and jam, and making small watches. 

 

So he plays a bad hand, and she takes him for everything he’s got. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He lurks in the back and nurses a bourbon on her eighteenth birthday. 

 

She’s got these nearly opaque hose on, a black that shimmers when she moves, and he follows their line until it dives under the curves of her skirt. He calves flare when she stands on tip-toes to kiss a blonde bloke, her slender fingers catch beads of moisture sliding along the cocktail Jackie has snuck her until she licks them clean.

 

She looks delicious, innocent. He knows better.

 

Mostly.

 

The Blonde Beefcake cracks a joke, and her laughter falls to the floor like a scatter of dropped beads. He watches her tongue as it wets her lips, her fingers that tug the hem of her vest down, her gooseflesh at the night air when she ducks out for a fag with Shareen.

 

He watches her, and she watches him, honey eyes dark and an eyebrow cocked. She wants to push him, finally, make him come over to her and dance his knobby long fingers across her hips to music that’s existed for less than a thousandth of his lifetime.

 

He is no stranger to patience, even if desire is an unfamiliar acquaintance. He hugs her, smells the fruit and chemicals on her hair, and brings his mouth to the shell of her ear. “Happy birthday,” he whispers low and deep, and her fingers clench around his arm and his heart races and he knows its time to go.

 

Someone’s always dying, and that’s an appointment he can comfortably keep.

 

 

 

 

 

“I want to know when you’re gonna call my name.”

 

“Rose Marion Tyler,” he says, drawing out each word like candy. He likes the round feel of it in his mouth. “There, that was easy,” and just like his grin, it is.

 

“I mean when I die,” she says, crossing her arms pointedly and shoving her calculus from Uni to the side.

 

“Oh, Rose,” and he wraps his arms around her, drawing her deep into the shelter of his chest, resting his chin on her hair. “No one wants to know how they’ll die, not really.”

 

“How will you die?” she asks, pulling back to stare into his velvet eyes.

 

“I already have.”

 

“No,” she shakes her head. “You’re more alive than anyone I’ve ever met.”

 

“Still dead.”

 

She puts his hand on her chest, over her beating heart. “Just like me. Because everything dies.”

 

“Yes,” he nods. “But something tells me we’ve time for a wicked game of poker, first.”

 

Tongue between her teeth, she grins at him, and he has to stamp down the fire that sings to him. It’s a familiar pattern and a familiar twist in his belly. He’s going to throw his hand so she’ll chew on her lip in triumph, leave it red and pouting and begging for his tongue to follow its shining contours.

 

He’s still her favorite loser, ever. 

 

This time, though, she’s not much in a mood for his games. She stands on tip-toes, stockings whispering against the carpet, and leans into his mouth. He stops breathing, not that he needs air to begin with, and her voice ghosts over him. 

 

“I’ll be right back,” she whispers. “And then you and I are gonna play for keeps.”

 

She vanishes from her bedroom, leaving a cloud of her scent behind. He starts breathing again, only just.

 

“Idiot,” he says. “Why would you keep following her for more than two decades? They grow up in two decades. They learn to be sexy in two decades. They learn—“

 

And he stops talking to himself, stops his pacing and tugging on errant locks of hair like a madman, when she returns, smirking, with a bottle of tequila in one hand and a lime in another. 

 

“Oh no,” he says.

 

“Oh yes,” she purrs.

 

“There are a thousand reasons—“

 

“Tequila fixes reason.”

 

“The dead can’t get drunk,” he tries.

 

“Liar. I’ve seen you.”

 

“Have not.”

 

“Have so.”

 

“Rose—“

 

“Fine,” she says. “But I’m done playing with you. It’s strip poker, or you can get out and go harvest some souls or something.”

 

She tucks the lime between her teeth, biting just a little, and he can smell the acidity of the citrus, and then she’s pulling her top over her head and she only has the black lacy thing underneath and the sweet curves above her bra—

 

Like every man that has ever been confronted with Rose Tyler on a mission, much less her breasts encased in black lace hands, he says yes without remembering what he’s agreeing to.

 

He doesn’t point out that her top hit the floor before he’d even shuffled.

 

 

 

 

 

“Theeeeeeere once was a man from Nantucket!” he sings happily, sloshing the glass bottle as he tries to hug her, but she’s laughing and stuffing the sucked-dry lime into his mouth. He grimaces at its sudden bite and peels off a sock with a free finger.

 

“No more songs!” she declares, shuffling the deck by landing on it with her bum and wiggling around. He tries to not see the bounce of her breasts as she does, but when she looks up and catches him staring anyway, he gives up the pretense. 

 

“I think,” he says slowly, resting his hands firmly on the floor to stop the spinning, “that I would like to put my mouth on those.”

 

Pulling an eight of clubs and a queen of spades from under her delicious curvature, she quirks her eyebrow and says, “These?” 

 

“Those,” he confirms, because cards and breasts are in a similar vicinity anyway, and neither will stop moving long enough for him to pinpoint their exact location.

 

He crawls on all fours to her, pants and one sock and a smattering of chest hair his only armor. She’s offering the cards, but he pushes them away and leans in to latch onto a nipple, thinking how little the rules matter, that it’s a ridiculous notion that the dead can’t love the living. 

 

The thump of her blood through her arteries and veins is what he wants, the feel of her alive and shining and howling like a wolf until she’s hoarse.

 

Except he misses her breast and falls on her, and she’s laughing and running her fingers through his hair soothingly, slurring “In’th’mornin’, love.”

 

They sleep in, and for the first time in a thousand years, he misses an appointment.

 

He misses one the next week, too.

 

 

 

 

 

She’s thirty-seven when she dies.

 

They’re walking along the corner of Cherry Street and feeding each other chips like lovesick teenagers. He rather likes it, a gleam of a single piece of salt at the corner of her mouth, shining in the setting sun. He’s paused to look into the sky and marvel at the scarlet smears when he hears it, the crunch of bone popping away from torn ligaments and somehow his entire awareness settles in on her gasp for air that gurgles while she pulls blood into her lungs.

 

The bus has already stopped, but it doesn’t matter.

 

She’s stopped breathing by the time he’s reached her. 

 

He kneels, her blood darkening the knees of his trousers, and cups the back of her neck to bring him to his chest. He knows he’s never going to feel her blood like it was again; its no longer a ferry for electricity that he traces in the small of her elbow with his tongue, or her wet heat when he brings her with his mouth. It’s this, here, on the gritty asphalt, drying in a sun that’s going down and spilling out of her until even the sky is dark.

 

He does what he does best, besides lose to her at poker. He leans in to her, pressing his cool cheek against hers as it clings to remnants of warmth, and whispers “Rose Tyler.”

 

Passersby don’t see the golden light, or her hand in his while he helps her to the curb, his nimble fingers assessing and repairing tissue damage. She stretches her neck to the side to feel her new skin, breathes into lungs that don’t need air.

 

“So,” she says idly, looking forlornly at where he’d dropped their chips. “Dead, huh?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“That was fast.”

 

“It usually is.”

 

She looks down at their joined hands, and he looks at her. 

 

“What now?” she whispers.

 

“Oh, I dunno.” A crew of police and medics have arrived for clean up, though no witnesses seem to be able to say what happened to the dead girl. She was right here! they’d insist. Where did she go?

 

“How long do you want to stay with me?”

 

She smiles and wiggles her fingers in his. “Forever, yeah?”

 

It’s dark now, and the blood still soaking her shirt looked impossibly black in the streetlamps. “Yeah,” he confirms softly. “But we’ve gotta get you new clothes. You’re gonna smell soon.”

 

He laughs when she smacks him. Together they walk away from where she died, and he’s already thinking about where to next.

 

He’s got a lot to show her.


End file.
